Management theories and approaches fall in and out of favor, as any experienced manager can tell you. That’s a fact of life in the business world, and one that makes the half-century staying power of the Aerospace Industry Manufacturing Seminar, or AIMS, all the more impressive.

AIMS is a two-week residential leadership development program created and administered in partnership by Boeing and Executive Education at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Over the years more than 3,000 Boeing employees have gone through the program. All have benefited from the program’s focus on such topics as improving the global supply chain, increasing efficiencies and productivity in operations management, boosting business performance, and becoming effective leaders of change management.

AIMS celebrated its 50th anniversary in July 2012, and students of Class 97 currently in the program joined some of the past graduates and UW representatives in mid-July for a dinner and reception at the Foster School of Business to honor this milestone and celebrate the program’s many accomplishments.

“AIMS is a great program and a wonderful partnership with Boeing and the University of Washington said Bill Schnettgoeke, vice president of Supply and Operations Chain for Boeing Defense, Space & Security and Lean+ Enterprise Initiative Leader, who spoke at the event. “Its success is due to its ability to evolve from a focus on manufacturing to encompass Engineering, Supplier Management, Quality, among other areas – all the better to support the businesses. As we work across the value stream, it brings a cross section of people together.”

Tim Copes, vice president of Manufacturing and Safety for Commercial Airplanes, also spoke at the July 19 dinner at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“As an AIMS graduate myself, I can attest to how well the program prepared me to take on the challenges I’ve faced throughout my career,” said Copes, who completed the program in 1993. “The program’s endurance speaks volumes about its ability to give managers the skills they need to contribute to Boeing’s growth and profitability, and about the company’s commitment to developing the strengths of its leaders.”

The AIMS program is a nomination program for managers and executives from across Boeing who have at least three years of experience with the company.

My name is Melon Feleke and I am a first generation immigrant. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and moved to Seattle with my family when I was ten years old. After attending Roosevelt High School I stayed true to my NW roots and attended the University of Washington.

For much of my childhood I was determined to be a doctor –despite the fact I fainted at pretty much every hospital visit and had no tolerance for watching pain or blood. Luckily my parents recognized my other strengths and encouraged me to consider business. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs; from my grandmother in Mettu to my parents here in Seattle; my mother owns a 7Eleven store in Mountlake Terrace. While in high school and college I managed inventory over the weekends and when my mother decided to take a vacation back home I took on the acting manager role for the store.

During my junior year at UW a classmate told me about the Business & Economic Development Center at the Foster School, specifically a program where students work with local minority business owners to improve their businesses. I thought it would be great to give back to my community in a very practical way. My client was the Theater Off Jackson, a unique minority-owned theater in the heart of the International District. The theater was looking to relocate because of increased property costs. Our team of five students and a professional advisor worked with the clients to identify their core target market, conduct location analysis, surveying clients and ultimately making a recommendation for their new location. Our clients were facing a very real business challenge and our team brought to them meaningful business knowledge and human capital.

My BEDC experience gave me a very real sample of a career in consulting and I loved it! First and foremost I loved helping my client – this was a real problem, and if the issues weren’t resolved the owners and employees would not have a paycheck to take home to their families. I especially like that there was a beginning middle and end to the project… an end with a real result. I entered the program thinking it would be a good chance to give back to my community, but what happened along the way is I discovered the career of consulting.

The BEDC offers a two way success story –businesses succeed and students receive real and meaningful experiences that shape their careers. Fast forward three years and I am now a consultant at Accenture Consulting.

Guest post by Connie Bourassa-Shaw, Director of the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington Foster School of Business

Artie BuerkYou know this story: an entrepreneur with a vision, a ridiculously small but adept team, a set of core advisors who are devoted to the cause, initial customers who come on board early and stay loyal, gaining traction, finding investors, creating products/services—and enormous fun along the way.

No, I’m not talking about a UW student start-up or any other start-up for that matter. I’m talking about CIE and the vision we developed back in 1997 for creating an entrepreneurship center that not only teaches the essentials of entrepreneurship, but gives students myriad opportunities to follow their passion. Not that long ago, CIE was a start-up.

We developed the core curriculum and added electives that built on that core. We launched the Business Plan Competition in 1998, and we’ve awarded $1.3 million in seed funding to student-led companies, including NanoString, Contour, Gravity Payments, Cadence Biomedical, Impel NeuroPharma, JoeyBra, PatientStream, MicroGreen, etc. We started the Lavin Entrepreneurship Program for incoming freshmen in 2007, began the Environmental Innovation Challenge in 2008, and the Jones Milestones/Foster Accelerator in 2010.

In those early days of creating an entrepreneurship center, I got tremendous assistance and guidance from the CIE Advisory Board, including sage personal advice from Artie Buerk. Artie’s a Husky—practical but not dogmatic, enthusiastic but perceptive. And today the Foster School of Business announced that with a $5.2 million gift, CIE is becoming the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship.

Naming gifts are the Holy Grail for university centers. It’s the longed-for vote of confidence. It says, I so believe in you that I’m proud to have my name associated with you for decades to come. It says, I’m betting money on your future. It says, I trust the center to do the right thing for students, for the UW, for Seattle.

I just wish you all could see the GIGANTIC smile on my face today. Thank you, Artie, for your belief in the CIE vision. No, I mean, the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship vision.

This month’s innovation blog focuses on an organization: Craft3. Craft3 is an old organization with a new name. Once known as Enterprise Cascadia, Craft3 is a financial institution that operates as a non-profit, lending capital to help businesses, communities, and consumers unable to secure regular financing.

Since 1995, Craft3 has invested $233 million in over 2,800 business and individuals in Pacific Northwest communities. Based in Ilwaco, Craft3 also has offices in downtown Seattle, Port Angeles, Astoria and Portland. In 2013, Craft3 will open new offices east of the mountains in both Washington and Oregon.

“This means that Craft3 can more effectively serve both rural and urban customers,” says Sue Taoka, Craft3’s Executive Vice President in Seattle. “In urban areas, we are more focused in helping targeted areas, like depressed neighborhoods and communities of color. With our strategy to expand in rural, regional centers, Craft3 will serve broader areas that have a potential for growth.”

Pippa’s Real Tea, a Craft3 project

As a “triple bottom line” organization, Craft3 measures its success in terms of economic, social and environmental outcomes. Its mission, to “strengthen economic, ecological and family resilience in Pacific Northwest communities,” is great news for those who have suffered during this economic downturn.

Craft3 fulfills this mission by offering loans to entrepreneurs to start or grow their business, and conservation organizations to acquire sensitive lands and restore habitat. It also makes loans to individually-owned tribal businesses, tribal enterprises, tribal government and non-profit organizations. Energy efficiency retrofit loans are available to homeowners and small businesses in Seattle and Portland.

And it doesn’t stop there. Craft3 also provides support to its customers by referring them to other sources, and making connections. For example, Craft3 was able to help a Quinault fisherman connect his caviar products with an urban store that also benefits from Craft3 services. Craft3 financed an Oregon organic creamery so that it could place its products in urban markets. Craft3’s loans to The Freshwater Trust, helped to plant trees along the Rogue River, to cool industrial effluent.

“We make loans to innovators of all kinds, to those who have difficulty getting loans from a for-profit financial institution,” says Sue. One of her favorite success stories? In the late 1990’s few babies were being born in the Shoalwater Bay Tribe. Most were stillborn. Craft3 helped fund a new health clinic, and when Sue visited 18 months ago, a healthy baby had just been born.

Small business entrepreneurs, small industry, human service agencies and farmers have all benefited from Craft3. And so has the environment, the community, and our future. For more information, go to www.craft3.org.

Rita Brogan is the CEO of PRR, a public affairs and communications firm based in Seattle, one of Washington’s 50 largest minority-owned businesses. Brogan was a recipient of the Foster School’s Business and Economic Development Center Asian/Pacific Islander Business Leadership Award. She writes the BEDC Brogan blog series monthly. Previously, she covered green economy issues with an emphasis on ways that businesses owned by people of color or women can create a competitive advantage.

Competitions were king in 2012 when it comes to which blog posts were most popular. Other reoccurring themes in the top blog posts: entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and cleantech. Check out the five most read blog posts of 2012, starting with number five.

Fifth most read blog postSocial entrepreneur people and investor choice winners 2012
Who won the 2012 University of Washington Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition trade show prizes of people’s choice and investors’ choice awards? Take a look at the top solutions to lifting people out of poverty.

FourthClean-technology winners awarded $22,500 in 2012
If our future will be driven by clean-tech innovation, universities are the laboratories for a green economy. University of Washington engineering and business teams won all five prizes at the 2012 UW Environmental Innovation Challenge, with 23 teams from 5 Pacific Northwest universities competing. Teams displayed prototypes and plans for clean-tech ventures that address market problems with forward-thinking, scalable solutions.

ThirdVideo: Starbucks VP Ben Packard on social entrepreneurship
Starbucks VP of Global Responsibility Ben Packard (Foster MBA 1998) spoke at the 2012 University of Washington Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition award banquet, emphasizing the significance of social justice. Companies are evolving to address issues typically handled by NGOs such as microfinance, economic opportunity and sustainable, earth-friendly ventures. Packard says, “Social entrepreneurship is nothing more than the future of business.”

Second$68,000 for winners of UW Business Plan Competition 2012
The 2012 University of Washington Foster School of Business’ Business Plan Competition had a record amount of seed funding and record participation. Winning start-ups are innovating in sectors like hyper-local agriculture, functional fashion, health care patient tracking technology and alternative forms of mobile advertising. UW Foster School Dean Jiambalvo says, “If you look at the basis for having a free and prosperous nation, it’s job creation. And where are jobs created? They are created by entrepreneurs.”

Most read blog post of 2012 on Foster Unplugged$34,000 for best social entrepreneur ideas of 2012
What do bee farmers, deaf people, jewelry artists, mature women and cataract sufferers have in common? Their lives will be improved by budding social entrepreneurs who traveled from as far away as Rwanda and Bangladesh to compete in the 2012 Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition.

The picture is of an empty and very long table on South bank in Melbourne. The organizers wanted to send the message that a lot of folks would go without a holiday meal if folks didn’t donate to help out. What a powerful symbol…empty table with lots and lots of seats needing to be filled.

Found in Translation: Frenchman fêted for bringing American management to Chinese business

When Cyrille Breard (TMMBA 2010) was studying global strategy, cross-cultural management and how to lead organizational change at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, he had no idea just how far—and how fast—his education would take him.

Elapsed time? Just over two years out of Foster’s Technology Management MBA Program.

“This is a huge award in China,” says Xiao-Ping Chen, a professor of management at the Foster School who taught his cross-cultural management class. “It’s quite a remarkable honor that Cyrille has won, and won so soon.”

If the pace seems extreme, well, then, that’s China. Breard was recognized for his significant coordination and collaboration work with COMAC, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, a state-owned company that launched in 2008 with ambitions to join the global aerospace market almost overnight.

Technical bona fides

Breard has the cut of an absolute engineer: PhD in mechanics from the Université du Havre in France. Author of papers with titles such as “An Integrated time-domain model for the prediction of fan forced response due to inlet distortion.” Researcher at the Rolls-Royce Vibration University Technology Center at Imperial College London. Senior scientist/engineer at Redmond-based Analytical Methods. Acoustic scientist engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

After proving himself a top technician during a decade in the United States, the French-born Breard aspired to manage innovation at a higher level. His time in Foster’s TMMBA Program proved pivotal.

“My outlook changed entirely,” he says. “As an engineer, you see a problem as something to fix. Now I see every problem as an opportunity. The Foster TMMBA experience made me more positive, more entrepreneurial, to view every situation as a way to improve something. That’s the philosophy I took with me to China.”

It would serve him well.

Unique opportunity
Breard was recruited under China’s Thousand Talents Program which imports international experts to help develop the nation’s industries. Aiding his decision was his wife Xuehong’s desire to return to her native China. With their two daughters, the family relocated to Shanghai in 2010. Xuehong went to work for a Chinese civil engineering firm. And Cyrille joined COMAC, at the time a two-year-old “startup” founded with $2.7 billion in capital. Its aim was unprecedented in the history of aviation.

“You don’t just create a company from scratch in the aerospace business,” Breard says. “I had to take this opportunity.”

He was initially hired for his acoustic engineering expertise. His charge was to bring the firm’s single-aisle commercial airplanes into compliance with strict international noise standards. But this proved to be a difficult challenge.

Like many Chinese enterprises, COMAC is organized into distinct departments with clear responsibilities. But acoustic engineering, by nature, must cut across every function of aircraft design. It requires enormous collaboration, something Breard knew well from his time in the US and at Foster.

So Breard took it upon himself to connect the dots. He amended his job description to become a kind of in-house organizational consultant. “I go into different departments and try to find a better way to do what they’re doing,” he says.

His tacit understanding of Guanxi, the powerful rule of relationships in China, enabled him to begin fostering a Western-style collaborative culture across the company. And he quickly proved himself an indispensable asset to COMAC—an engineer who knows how to manage organizations.

Famous in China

COMAC and the Chinese government formally recognized Breard’s contributions in September. Xuehong joined him in Beijing for the ceremony. And both attended, as special guests, the following day’s National Banquet, officiated by Premier Wen and then-President Hu Jintao.

In early December, Breard and a small group of foreign experts met with Xi Jinping, the newly elected General Secretary of China’s Communist Party and likely next president of China.

“There are not many people who get the chance to do these things in their lives,” Breard says.

All of this has been covered extensively by the Chinese press, bringing him a rapidly growing notoriety.

Breard says his first sensation of celebrity came a few weeks after the Friendship Award proceedings. A two-minute profile of his work at COMAC aired in prime time of the national news broadcast on CCTV1. The program was viewed by over 320 million people.

“After that,” Breard says, “people I didn’t even know where coming up to me and saying, ‘Now you’re famous in China.’ ”

Suzan DelBene (MBA 1990) has been a Microsoft vice president, CEO of a software startup, microfinance consultant, and director of a state agency. Now she is representing Washington state’s First Congressional District in Washington D.C.

DelBene ran for Congress to improve the economy and put the middle class first. According to The Seattle Times, DelBene said, “For me this campaign always has been about standing up for working families and the middle class.” She won the district with 54% of the votes and was sworn into office on November 13, 2012. She is finishing the final weeks of former Congressman Jay Inslee’s term and will start her 2-year term in January.

Prior to being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, she was looking for ways to help businesses as director of the Washington State Department of Revenue. Governor Chris Gregoire appointed DelBene to head the state’s tax collection agency after her first foray into politics as a 2010 candidate for Washington’s Eighth Congressional District. That highly credible effort earned her the endorsement of the Seattle Times, which cited her “tremendous promise” and “sharp business and entrepreneurial skills.”

DelBene freely admits she knew little about tax administration before agreeing to run the agency that collects more than 90 percent of state taxes. But observers say she has been a quick study on the complex intricacies of tax policy.

After DelBene joined the agency, the governor directed her to examine ways it could improve the business climate by streamlining the tax system. DelBene consulted businesses and other stakeholders across the state to determine what the state could do to reduce the burden of complying with multiple state and local tax obligations. The resulting report issued in June 2011 recommended that the state consider assuming administration of local business and occupation taxes, much as it now collects local sales taxes. Gregoire subsequently directed the Department to work with business and local governments to develop a proposal. Such an overhaul of the tax system would require legislative approval.

In the end, cities such as Tacoma and Seattle were resistant to centralizing the collection of B&O taxes at the state level, and as a result the bill was not approved. While DelBene was not able to centralize B&O tax collection, she was able to move business licensing to the Department of Revenue from the Department of Licensing, which helps streamline the process of starting a business.

The Eastside resident started her career in immunology research after graduating from Reed College in Portland. She first became interested in the business side of technology while working at ZymoGenetics in Seattle. That led her to enter the Foster School in 1988. She interned at Microsoft while in school and joined the company after graduation, marketing Windows 95 and other products. She then left Microsoft to help launch drugstore.com in 1998, and in 2000 became CEO of Nimble Technology, a data integration software firm. Along the way, she’s also mentored students at the Foster School.

DelBene returned to Microsoft in 2004 as a corporate vice president for the mobile communications business, and in 2008 became a consultant at Global Partnerships, a microfinance nonprofit.

Now that she is on the government side of things at the national level, DelBene’s business background will come in handy again as she works to solve the economic issues currently facing the United States.

The 2012 University of Washington Minority Business Awards honored ten top performing minority-owned ventures in the state of Washington.

The December 6 event, co-hosted by the Business and Economic Development Center (BEDC) at the UW Foster School of Business and the Puget Sound Business Journal, also unveiled an expanded partnership between BEDC and JPMorgan Chase, and welcomed back an old friend,

That would be Ali Tarhouni, the popular senior lecturer who famously left his post at Foster in early 2011 to serve as finance minister for the Libyan revolutionary government. Tarhouni, who has initially declined a run for the newly democratic nation’s prime minister, expressed his pride in the growth of this unique Center that he helped found in the early 1990s.

“The Foster School of Business has heart,” he said. “We teach our students how to create wealth, and that’s our primary responsibility. But I’m also proud to be associated with a school that subscribes to do the right thing—even though it doesn’t usually have an immediate reward… Doing what is right and creating wealth aren’t mutually exclusive.”

The long-term impact of BEDC in promoting a robust economic diversity across the state was evident in the range of 2012 awardees.

The William D. Bradford Minority Business of the Year is Redapt, the Redmond-based provider of innovative data center infrastructure solutions.

Zones, the Auburn-based enterprise IT firm, received special commendation for reaching $1 billion in annual revenues. Accepting the award was Firoz Lalji, CEO and chairman of Zones, who noted that his company has become successful by serving businesses nationwide with expertise in all areas of IT, including systems and storage, networking and security, software, virtualization, procurement, logistics, any and everything tech.

Michael Verchot, founding director of BEDC, announced a transformational $600,000 gift from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the largest in the center’s 17-year history. Verchot said that the gift will allow the center to engage more students in consulting to small businesses in Seattle’s low- and moderate-income communities and to grow its faculty-led small business classes throughout the state. And, perhaps most significantly, the investment also will enable the center to build a regional and national network of business schools that follow the BEDC model to spark economic development in their own communities.

This newest investment brings Chase’s total support of BEDC over the years to more than $900,000. “At JPMorgan Chase, we believe in strengthening small business and creating jobs. And we believe that is critical to the progress of our country,” said Curt Fraser, Chase’s CEO of middle market banking for the Pacific Northwest. “We’re thrilled to partner with the UW Business and Economic Development Center in working to do just that.”

Recently, I traveled to Melbourne Australia for a series of lectures and short workshops on examining the total leadership system in organizations. By total leadership system, we mean examining leadership at all levels, looking down, peer to peer sideways, and where folks are leading up measuring a broad range of leadership styles (e.g., transformational, authentic, authoritarian, ethical, etc.) within and between levels and units in organizations. By examining the total leadership system, we hope to assess all of the key leadership elements that positively contribute to organizational change and transformation.

I found that before leaving the U.S., everyone who I told about the trip smiled and said something like, ‘that’s going to be a lot of fun’ or ‘what a great place to go.’ I told my Australian colleagues that we have serious Australian envy in my country. And when I said that, I didn’t realize that on this trip to Australia that my envy would only deepen as I learned that the Australians just have the best expressions.

Being in Australia also reminded me that one could be lured into a state of lacking self-awareness about cultural differences because Australians speak English and have a lot of common interests and history in line with those of us from the U.S. When I am in other cultures where the language is different, I am more keenly aware of observing and listening to make sure I understand the cultural nuances. In Australia one can get away with that for a while, until you realize that ‘conservative’ means ‘liberal’ in Australia and vice versa.

In one of the last workshops I was doing in Australia, someone said something that got me reflecting and I must admit I laughed out loud. At one point in the workshop, one of the participants said, “That guy just spit the dummy!” You can let those comments go by, and there were several such expressions, but I decided to stop on this one and ask, “What could spitting the dummy possibly be?” I learned that a dummy is what we would call a baby’s pacifier, and when you spit the dummy, all hell breaks loose. Throughout the remainder of the day, I tried to find every possible instance to use the term, spitting the dummy, or even better, you are a dummy spitter.

So, just when you think the folks you are with are familiar, they spit the dummy and all hell breaks loose!